Poll: What Should Glen Do Next?
Glen Walker (2585) 469 posts |
I’m slowly getting things together which will allow me to do some work on RISC OS once more (after a year away) but I am not sure what to do so thought I’d throw it open to the wider community to see what you would all be interested in. Here is a list of things where I could potentially be of use (and I make no guarantees!):
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Rick Murray (539) 13429 posts |
Weren’t they asking for help with the RISC OS version? Maybe this… |
Michael Grunditz (467) 531 posts |
NetSurf! |
Dave Higton (1515) 3409 posts |
Yes! |
John Sandgrounder (1650) 574 posts |
Seems to be a popular answer.
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Glen Walker (2585) 469 posts |
haha it does doesn’t it!
…nothing is too much to dream about! I don’t know to be honest…its probably something like 3 years since I touched the NetSurf code and that was only minor changes… |
John Sandgrounder (1650) 574 posts |
You should do something you enjoy! The rest of us will be grateful in any case. |
Glen Walker (2585) 469 posts |
I would enjoy all of those things—I didn’t mean to come across as rude/flippant sorry! The only reason I haven’t touched NetSurf in so long is that I have been busy with other things but am hoping to get some time back when I change jobs (possibly in September). |
Clive Semmens (2335) 3136 posts |
This. In Spades. Doubled, redoubled, and vulnerable. |
Rick Murray (539) 13429 posts |
Rock climbing? ☺ |
Glen Walker (2585) 469 posts |
Well when it comes to that its more like: 1. Cycling But I can’t do 1. very much at the moment (except maybe to-from work), I tend to do 2. at lunchtimes and have found if I do too much then it just gets rubbish so I stick to about a maximum of 1000 words a day when I’m going full speed (which is actually quite rare). So that leaves 3! Think I will be doing something with NetSurf until I’m forced to fix the RPCEmu when I get a new Mac…which given how expensive they are gives me plenty of time (or rather someone else plenty of time to fix it first!) …now then…what’s all this fuss about HTML5…? |
Michael Grunditz (467) 531 posts |
Unless you want to do a JIT js implementation , I suggest that you don’t work on HTML5! |
nemo (145) 2437 posts |
Perfect is the enemy of good. Any JS is better than no JS. |
David Feugey (2125) 2687 posts |
:)
Could be very useful, as it will probably fix the keyboard on the RISC OS version of RPCEmu. |
nemo (145) 2437 posts | |
Raik (463) 2030 posts |
UTF-8 coding/encoding… |
Glen Walker (2585) 469 posts |
nemo: what program is that you have which can read/display Unicode?
Well I don’t know…but maybe I can look into it? Currently fighting weird crashes on my Pi. |
Steffen Huber (91) 1945 posts |
iconv is not the answer to everything, and handling UTF-8 in C is not really straightforward (and a lot harder in BBC BASIC, and here basically ends the list of programming languages when developing for RISC OS). The C community has not even settled on a sensible string handling library. And on RISC OS, the problems with the Font Manager are “on top” (which is why rufl again by the NetSurf developers needs to exist). But what is most important: the developers need to be aware of the problems surrounding the whole encoding issue. Even in Java, which has comparatively good Unicode and encoding support out-of-the-box, it is still easy to get it wrong. And RISC OS development seems to be still mostly stuck in the late 80s. Remember the famous RISCOSLtd. list of things why RISC OS 5 is not really needed? The Font Manager’s Unicode feature was dismissed because “we mostly speak English”. And this basically also sums up Acorn’s stance on this, if the Territory stuff is anything to go by. |
nemo (145) 2437 posts |
I feel I must apologise for the conduct of my nation since the war
Uggh <looks shifty>, well I’ve been working on a system that allows RISC OS to use UTF-8 everywhere – at the command line, in BASIC, across all APIs. That program is simply sending the lines of the text file to Combining the principle of ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ with ‘The Pareto Principle’ means I’ve been working on this for as long as anyone can remember. On the plus side, the font does have over 28,000 characters, so if you decided to beat me to release I have a slight head-start. I have found a curious thing: If you do something for fun, you tend to stop when it stops being fun, or when something more fun comes along. <slaps own wrist>
Conversion from Unicode is almost always the wrong thing to do. We want to work directly in Unicode, and the most sensible encoding (I’m looking at you, Windows) is UTF-8. This adds a little1 complication for programmers, and requires some small API changes/reimplementation. For the user there should be no noticeable difference other than there being rather more characters available. I can already Anyway, I am lurching towards a release. 1 Unicode character composition and reordering for rendering is spectacularly complicated and effectively pointless without OpenType support. That’s a project for another day. However, representation of the Unicode stream without composition is straightforward, and only requires a small amount of cleverness when moving the cursor/calculating mouse-click positions. The UnicodeSupport module does all the hard work. |
Glen Walker (2585) 469 posts |
Cool! I had no idea someone else was into doing this…
Unlikely that I’ll be able to beat you as I haven’t done anything for a year, the stuff I did was mostly garbage (my second ever RISC OS program) so I’ll be starting from scratch! I might still create my own editor because I had a whacky idea at making it into an IDE for embedded programming (at first I was interested in MSP430 chips but now I’m leaning towards SiFive ones…although it would mean porting some kind of compiler which is another mammoth task!) Anyway – unlikely I’ll beat you but if I can be any assistance or simply a beta tester on my variety of flaky Pis then let me know!
Oops! I had based my whole approach on the “Save as UTF-8…”/“Load as UTF-8…” principle…but largely because I thought it would be easier!
I’m lurching towards starting ! |
Paul Sprangers (346) 490 posts |
Allow me to lead by example: I just started waiting impatiently. |
Rick Murray (539) 13429 posts |
Lurching for me is the act of getting up every morning… |
GavinWraith (26) 1538 posts |
RiscLua 6 has a utf library. For details see the Help option and section 6.5 of the Manual. |
nemo (145) 2437 posts |
Welcome to my parlour. Which UTF? WUTF? CUTF? Strict UTF-8 with no 5 & 6 byte sequences, overlong NUL, surrogates or non-characters? Some particular combination of strict and permissive decided by somebody and hence inflicted on everyone else? The UnicodeSupport module I’m developing allows individual control over (ISTR) six different permissions for UTF-8 compliance… and hence, I suppose, supports 64 different UTF-8s. And I haven’t even mentioned fallback. |
Matthew Phillips (473) 688 posts |
RiscOSM uses iconv and RUfl for some aspects of the interface. We do not at present support font substitution on the map itself, but it works in most of the rest of the user interface. RUfl does not support right to left writing systems automatically, so if you have an Arabic or Hebrew font the maps will look dreadful. If you try maps of Poland or the Czech republic, though, it all works nicely, as the ROM fonts cover Latin 2. We use iconv to allow you to search for placenames without having to type all the accents. As for why nobody does it? Laziness, lack of understanding, lack of demand, lack of time. |